Principle and Propensity
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Principle and Propensity

Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century British and American Bildungsroman

Kelsey L. Bennett

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Principle and Propensity

Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century British and American Bildungsroman

Kelsey L. Bennett

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About This Book

Reimagining the coming-of-age literary tradition in the U.S. and U.K. within dynamic theological contexts

Scholars have traditionally relied upon the assumption that the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in the Goethean tradition is an intrinsically secular genre exclusive to Europe, incompatible with the literature of a democratically based culture. By combining intellectual history with genre criticism, Principle and Propensity provides a critical reassessment of the bildungsroman, beginning with its largely overlooked theological premises: bildung as formation of the self in the image of God. Kelsey L. Bennett examines the dynamic differences, tensions, and possibilities that arise as interest in spiritual growth, or self-formation, collides with the democratic and quasi-democratic culture in the nineteenth-century British and American bildungsroman.

Beginning with the idea that interest in an individual's moral and psychological growth, or bildung, originated as a religious exercise in the context of Protestant theological traditions, Bennett shows how these traditions found ways into the bildungsroman, the literary genre most closely concerned with the relationship between individual experience and self-formation.

Part 1 of Principle and Propensity examines the attributes of parallel national traditions of spiritual self-formation as they convened under the auspices of the international revival movements: the Evangelical Revival, the Great Awakening, and the renewal of Pietism in Germany, led respectively by John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and Count Nikolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf. Further it reveals the ways in which spiritual self-formation and the international revival movements coalesce in the bildungsroman prototype, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). Part 2 in turn explores the ways these traditions manifest themselves in the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in England and the United States through Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Pierre, and Portrait of a Lady.

Though Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was a library staple for most serious writers in nineteenth-century England and in the United States, Bennett shows how writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Henry James also drew on their own religious traditions of self-formation, adding richness and distinction to the received genre.

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Part I

I remember by the way that you once asked me in those old Seminary days we have been talking about, to recount to you the little Iliad of my private bosom.
Henry James Sr., “Seminary Days.”

1

JOHN WESLEY’S FORMATIVE “SPIRITUAL EMPIRICISM”

image
Things are wrong with them; and “What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?” is the form of their question.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience
Christianity, considered as an inward principle . . . is holiness and happiness, the image of God impressed on a created spirit.
John Wesley, “A Plain Account of Genuine Christianity”

Possibilities for This Life: The Evangelical Revival in England

Beyond Germany’s borders, a deep tradition of spiritual formation had long been in practice throughout Protestant England and subsequently in colonial America. Indeed fundamental differences existed between eighteenth-century English and American understandings of spiritual formation that would have consequences reaching far into the nineteenth century. That is, the ways religious writers understood the role experience plays in spiritual self-formation would affect the ways in which later secular authors on both sides of the Atlantic understood the same in their fiction. The writings of Methodist John Wesley on the one hand advance a reasonable, practical, optimistic, and progressive view of personal development and the role of world experience as the individual strives for happiness, perfection, and eventually, for union with God. In contrast the often perilous contact of Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinist orthodoxy with the mutable world frequently infuses experience with a paradoxical quality and fosters a mystical, transcendental longing for self-annihilation in God.
I concentrate on contemporaries Wesley and Edwards and, in connection with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Count Zinzendorf, because together they represent a nexus within the mid-century international revival movement: the Evangelical Revival, the Great Awakening, and the renewal of Pietism respectively in England, America, and Germany. While united in their basic concern with the individual’s developing identity in relation to God, each leading figure advanced clashing interpretations of the fragile balance between free grace and ethical responsibility. Most simply stated, Wesley’s doctrine of Christian perfection tended toward an externally oriented Arminianism on the one extreme; Edwards’s (and, as Wesley would eventually charge, Zinzendorf’s) insistence on irresistible grace and inward witness inclined in the opposite direction of the inwardly oriented antinomianism.
Several central currents of thought, both theological and philosophical, in Protestant England leading up to the Evangelical Revival laid the foundations for Wesley’s original and fundamentally optimistic view that “Christian perfection,” or reforming the self in the image of God, is possible in this life for everyone.1 The process of perfection as Wesley conceived it necessarily involves the active concurrence between reason and the affections, faith and works, spiritual and empirical experience.
In English Protestant theology, beginning around the middle of the seventeenth century with the “Latitude-men,” reason and practical ethics were elemental to understanding individual spiritual formation. In opposition to the Calvinist emphasis on free grace and innate depravity (as well as Hobbesian selfishness), latitudinarian sermons advanced the concept of individual “Primitive Integrity,” that religion is wholly compatible with everyday living; in seeking happiness people will naturally recognize that it is in their best interest to pursue the religious life. By taking a commonsense approach to religion and downplaying doctrine, by the close of the century the latitudinarians had become the dominant force within the Church of England.2
In response Nonconformists such as John Bunyan and Richard Baxter sought to preserve the importance of grace and the distinction between the religious and the secular life that the latitudinarians had sought to minimize. Their separate dissenting traditions (Baptist and Presbyterian, respectively), however, led them to value experience (“works”) differently. Bunyan showed his separatist and anti-Arminian tendencies by insisting on grace and faith as operating independently of outward circumstances. Baxter, on the other hand, identified more with the Puritan tradition (in the sense of those seeking to reform the church from within) by disapproving of antinomians and placing high value on practical works.
The larger conflict dramatized in the seventeenth century between the rational latitudinarians of the Established Church and Evangelical Nonconformists would continue into the eighteenth century within the dissenting tradition itself. The role the affections should play in relation to reason and grace as a part of spiritual formation became increasingly important to Dissenters. Up through the middle of the eighteenth century, divines in both England and America (including Edwards) would count reason and the affections not as mutually exclusive but rather as necessarily working together in the process of spiritual formation. Reason identifies and judges the soundness of revelation, but the passions are necessary for the individual to act in accordance with the newfound inner condition. But by using rhetoric of the affections, divines opened themselves to the charge of enthusiasm, which would become a significant problem accompanying the revivals in both England and America.3
It is from within this theological context that Methodism appeared as a part of the Church of England itself.4 As for Wesley’s role in shaping eighteenth-century English understanding of individual spiritual formation, Methodism offered itself as an integrated alternative to Calvinism, which, in Wesley’s words, is “the direct antidote to Methodism, the doctrine of heart-holiness” (qtd. in Rivers, Reason 1:212). Experience and “works” in themselves are not enough to gain salvation, yet they are an integral part of the process toward it. Indeed Methodism’s emphasis on process makes it particularly suitable to the concept of spiritual self-formation: as Rivers succinctly puts it, the regenerate individual, “whose life is a process of recovering in himself the image of God, will be perfect; yet this perfection is possible to all human beings.”5
In addition to the theological precedents, some critical attention has been directed toward the philosophical contribution of the British Enlightenment to Wesley’s thought, particularly with respect to his attitude toward experience. Generally, however, critics have downplayed the connection in favor of emphasizing Wesley’s extrasensory or primitively emotional understanding of religious epistemology.6 But in Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism, Richard E. Brantley makes the case for Wesley’s embrace of experience, worldly and otherworldly, as integral to salvation and living happiness. Experience understood in this way would, in turn, have a literary influence on nineteenth-century Britain, both for the Romantics and the Victorians (2, 211–12). Brantley contends that on the one hand Wesley understands (via Locke) that religion is significantly determined by empirical experience, and reciprocally that experience need not be empirical. This thesis is nowhere more apparent than in the language Wesley uses to describe faith in terms parallel to sense experience; he implies that “sense-perception is analogically and therefore really related to faith” while at the same time he is careful to acknowledge that spiritual and empirical experiences require distinct “senses” (48).7
Similarly Dreyer makes the case that experience composes the cornerstone of Wesley’s thought. Where Methodism as a theological system is, finally, incoherent, epistemologically it is consistent on the principle that “nothing is known that cannot be felt” (29). “Sensible experience” was the basis of Wesley’s conversion, and Dreyer offers several interpretations of what this may mean (in addition to what it does not): knowledge of God by manifest sensation or emotion; in contrast to the mystics who seek self-immolation in God, examination of the knowable self; directly perceptible witness; spiritual senses for spiritual truths (16–18). In sum knowledge and experience of faith are indissolubly linked.
Wesley’s psychological emphasis on rigorous self-examination over the mystical quest to lose the self in contemplation of God marks an important contrast to Jonathan Edwards. Whereas self-examination in Edwards’s “Personal Narrative” is, for instance, accompanied by ecstatic longing for the absolute experience of being “emptied and annihilated” and “swallowed up” in God, Wesley focuses on sanctification as one moment in a long, living progression toward perfection that may be applied to all of the Christian’s worldly actions.8 It is a noteworthy coincidence that to make this point Wesley uses the very same language as Edwards does: in a letter Wesley urges Ann Bolton to avoid mystics who are guilty of “refining” religion and instead to experience “humble, gentle, patient love,” for “believe me, you can find nothing higher than this till mortality is swallowed up in life. . . . All the high-sounding or mysterious expressions used by [the mystics] either mean no more than this or they mean wrong. O beware of them!” (Wesley, Letters 5:342). The empirical emphasis on “swallowed up” here stands in direct opposition to Edwards’s mystical meaning: it is the moment in which the individual confronts mortality. The highest experience in life is not the transcendental vision of dissolving into God but rather love as qualified by humility, patience, and gentleness, all of which are virtues applicable to particular situations the individual encounters daily. Similarly in an earlier letter to Bolton, he again uses the very same language of Edwards (in this case vaguely attributed to Roman Catholic writers) to show his disapproval: “They are perpetually talking of ‘self-emptiness, self-inanition, self-annihilation,’ and the like: all very near akin to ‘self-contradiction’ as a good man used to say” (5:313).9
Finally Theodore Runyon perhaps puts it best when he describes Wesley’s attitude toward experience as “spiritual empiricism” (189). The most important transformation on which every individual should concentrate is the one that occurs in this world: for Wesley “genuine knowledge of God [should] be of such a nature that the knower is transformed in the knowing process” (193). Runyon characterizes transformation as occurring through the experience of conversion, or regeneration, in which the image of God reconstitutes itself in the individual. Experience in this sense originates neither in the affections nor as a set of innate ideas in the mind. Insofar as Wesley instead identifies experience as something originating outside the self, his understanding is Lockean. From this basis Runyon offers a new reading of Wesley’s Aldersgate conversion experience that differs from the usual account of it as a prime example of religious subjectivity.10 Rather “it is the other that is the primary content of experience and the self only as the recipient of the activity of the other. The sensation in the subject testifies to the revealed reality of the object and the epistemological relationship between them” (191). Applied to Wesley’s conversion, then, the sensation he felt in his heart was secondary to, and a sacramental symbol of, the primary activity of God’s image renewing itself within him.
Runyon’s article provides a platform from which we may risk a definition of spiritual self-formation as Wesley understood it. For Wesley “knowledge is regeneration—the awakening of sensitivities within the knower which allow the knower to participate in the reality of the real world as constituted by the Creator and at the same time to actualize the full capacities of the self” (190–91). Gaining knowledge, then, through experience leads the individual to recover the image of God within and yet, utterly unlike the mystics, to preserve and improve individual identity. This hopeful, practical view of self-formation emphasizes process and a hierarchical devotion both to God and to the human community. In a sense the individual becomes a superlative version of the preconversion self, at once closely united with Christ but also fully capable of doing God’s work in the world.

Perfection in Time

Perhaps the most concrete way to see Wesley’s “spiritual empiricism” at work in the process of self-formation is through his autobiographical writings in combination with his explanation of the doctrine of Christian Perfection. Wesley never composed an official narrative of his conversion or a spiritual autobiography, but he does informally describe the process of his spiritual formation, including the conversion experience, in his journal for the year 1738. In addition to this, the largely retrospective “Plain Account of Christian Perfection” has been described as a “partial spiritual autobiography” with its emphasis on process and the (Arminian) importance of works (Whaling, John 72).
As Wesley’s biographer Henry D. Rack observes, Methodist diaries served as “an aid to spiritual self-development,” a quality they shared with their Puritan predecessors and Pietist contemporaries (421).11 A representative example of this approach appears in Wesley’s journal entry for Wednesday, May 24, 1738, in which he enumerates his spiritual progress from boyhood through his conversion at Aldersgate Street. The latter occurred, significantly, among his Moravian associates (Journal 1:475). Though the entry dramatizes Wesley’s ongoing conflict between outward and inner experience of the religious life, he emphasizes that “the image of God, was what I aimed at in all,” and he proceeds to indicate that the way to reach it was through concrete actions, or “by doing his will, not my own” (1:468). He mentions earlier in the same year that his growing acquaintance with mystical writings made union with God appear to be the highest achievement in life, but he immediately recognized that this type of union came at the expense of doing good in the world (1:418). Wesley’s distaste for the mystical approach to spiritual formation appears as early as 1726 when, as a young college man in his early twenties, he “began to see more and more the value of time” (1:467). Rather than cultivating a timeless inner closeness with God, Wesley recognized the importance of cultivating God’s image in time. Understood in this way, religious self-formation is subject to the particular slowness, doubt, and hesitations that come with daily living.12 Further that the conversion experience itself—of which Wesley famously described, “I felt my heart strangely warmed”—did not radically change these realities in Wesley’s own life indicates that conversion is only one moment in a long living continuum of growing in grace. Indeed immediately after returning home on that May evening, he writes he was “much buffeted with temptations; but they fled away. They returned again and again.”
Wesley’s complex understanding of individual spiritual formation as encompassing advancing, wavering, retreat, falling, and rising would become central to his controversial doctrine of Christian Perfection. In “A Plain Account,” not only does he allow for converted individuals to “grow in grace,” but he warns that without diligence, it is possible to fall from it. And yet for those fallen individuals who had once “experienced all that [he means] by perfection,” it is possible to “recover” their former state once more (11:426–27). Again Wesley appeals to experience: he is aware of many who have repeatedly regressed before becoming “established” in perfection. But most important to the process of self-regeneration is the recognition of its spontaneous beginnings, which Wesley describes with a special kind of urgency: “we are to expect it, not at death, but every moment; that now is the accepted time, now is the day of this salvation” (11:393). What gives this position its empiricism—and a large part of its controversy as well as its appeal—is the emphasis on spirituality for the living: once the individual begins the hard work of self-reformation in time, the process itself shall carry on into eternity (11:426).
This fundamentally forgiving, inclusive, optimistic approach to spiritual self-formation takes implicitly into account all obstacles that daily living, or sense experience itself, presents to the believer. Experience is not to be shunned in pursuit of inner stillness but rather through it, sometimes in spite of it; however slow the process, it is possible to reach the highest goal of re-creating the self in the image of God: “Earth then a scale to heaven shall be; / Sense shall point out the road” (11:370). These words, from a hymn he and his brother composed, encapsulate beautifully Wesley’s particular sense of “spiritual empiricism.” Furthermore the practical nature of Wesley’s doctrine of Christian Perfection is apparent in his affirmation that perfection and infirmity (of body or mind) may coexist as “a natural consequence of the soul’s dwelling in flesh and blood” (11:394). Wesley invites the believer to accept the unavoidable flaws inherent in the human condition as well as the possibility of reaching living perfection.
The central role of experience in Wesley’s religio...

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